Concerns with this assessment

1. A clearly defined and fully assessed transportation route is missing from this assessment. All First Nation communities and Ontario municipalities that are along the route should be consulted directly. This should include meaningful engagement, formal impact assessment, and opportunities for public hearings that specifically address the risks associated with the transportation of radioactive materials. 

When doing the transportation assessment portion, transportation safety studies require independent review by a panel. Existing studies indicating that transportation casks can withstand severe impacts, fires, and prolonged water immersion have been based on controlled test scenarios. These do not adequately reflect the real-world, unique conditions in northwestern Ontario, where extreme weather, remote terrain, limited emergency response capacity, frequent accidents, ice roads, rail conditions, forest fires, flooding, and long distances between response resources could all influence accident outcomes.

2. The nuclear waste management organization has acknowledged that during the process of transferring used fuel from transportation containers into the repository system, there WILL be releases of radioactive materials. The extent to which radioactive materials will affect air, watersheds, soil, wildlife, human health have not been sufficiently investigated nor made publicly available. This needs to be included in the assessment.

There are hundreds of thousands of people living in the watersheds of the DGR zone that would be affected, as well as countless animal species, some of which are relied upon for fishing and hunting. When considering the transportation route, these numbers increase substantially. This needs to be considered in the assessment of this project.

3. More broadly, this project raises a bigger question about how sustainable nuclear energy really is when you include the full life cycle, especially the long-term management of its waste, when compared to wind or solar energy which have the potential to be scaled up more quickly and with fewer long-term liabilities. Our generation now better understands the complexity and risks of nuclear waste disposal and transportation. At the time of the nuclear energy boom in the late 1960's to 1980s, considerations of dealing with the waste were not well known. The responsibility was simply left to the future generations, and yet again we are doing the same, all while perpetuating the burden of long-lived contamination. Nuclear energy is NOT a renewable source of energy. Now that we know this - KNOW BETTER, DO BETTER.